Ala intelligence is a function of compute, there was no guarantee that you need to 10x compute for 10% better performance or something like that.
If you ask the labs they will say the scaling is fairly linear or atleast sub-quadratic, they definitely won't say it's exponential.
No one was thinking we need to 10x compute from here again for another 10-20% increase in performance.
It's only been since Opus 4.6 that the compute growth vs improvements are starting to feel this way.
For instance GPT-3 vs GPT-4 was practically a 10-100x jump for a 10-100x increase in compute, we went from broken sentences to fully formed essays writing, speech and so on.
GPT-4 vs GPT-5 was just as massive we went from no agentic capabilities to fully agentic, 10-100x for a 10-100x increase in compute usage.
GPT-5 vs GPT-6 was atleast a 10x (upto 100x) increase in compute, but the difference is not that clear sure people say that one is significantly better than the other, but GPT-5.5 was good enough compared to where we are today.
Even on benchmarks compared to GPT-5.2 Codex we have almost 2x'ed the performance on say artificial analysis (53 vs 29). This is absurd. 10-100x increase in compute for 2-5x performance improvement is a massive gap.
[1]: https://bitterlesson.ai/ [2]: https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=gpt-6-astra%2Cgpt-6-lu...